The news is this: a thirteen-year-old girl has had her sex corrected from female to male. Psychotherapeutic path followed consistently, hormonal therapies started, full awareness of the inconsistency between body and identity, say his family and his lawyers. The court took note and decided. Everything is fine. All legal. All very adult. And all very disturbing.
Let’s be clear: the point is not – it should be said straight away, to avoid misunderstandings – gender change. The problem lies entirely in that adjective that accompanies the decision: irreversible. And in the noun that justifies it: minor. We live in an era in which adolescence, according to psychologists and pedagogists, extends, expands and slips well beyond the age of eighteen. Fragile, uncertain, protected kids. Often in difficulty when it comes to choosing a faculty, a job, a direction, a life project, a partner. In need of accompaniment, of safety nets, for what Don Antonio Mazzi, who knows a lot about adolescents, has defined as the most important and complex age of life, certainly not a prolonged childhood but a transformation towards adulthood.
Then, suddenly, the legal miracle happens: at thirteen they become mature. Lucid. Definitive. If so, then let’s take it seriously. If a thirteen-year-old is considered capable of making irreversible and profound decisions about his own body and his own destiny, about his own personality, why not send him to vote? Why not give him the license? Why not entrust him with a company, a mortgage, a contract to sign without escape clauses?
And pushing the reasoning to the extreme, why not also recognize the full availability of one’s life, including the right to renounce it? This is where something doesn’t add up. Not out of ideology. Not out of malice. But by simple logic, we could even go so far as to call it common sense.
A thirteen year old can be very sincere in his feelings. He can really suffer. He can experience authentic and excruciating discomfort. It must be followed, protected and accompanied. But he cannot be as mature as an adult. It is not by definition. It isn’t because his personality, which is approaching adolescence, is still in the making. It is not because its identity is, by nature, mobile, contradictory, under construction. Today we feel one thing, tomorrow it could be another after a journey that contemplates the most fascinating period of life, “the years in your pocket”, as the filmmaker Truffaut defined them. It is the risk, the complexity and at the same time the richness of that age. Why else on earth would juvenile courts exist? Can a gender identity really be so consolidated to the point of establishing an intervention for gender change, establishing a correction of one’s registry status?
The question then is not whether that boy has the right to be heard. Of course yes. The real question is whether adults are still being adults. If they still know how to say an unpopular but necessary word: wait. Wait until you grow up. Wait until you change your mind. Wait until you truly become your own master.
Because protecting a minor does not mean always supporting him. It also means setting a limit, taking on the weight of a responsibility that today seems out of fashion. The paradox of this story is all here: in the name of protection, protection is renounced. In the name of freedom, a boy is given a decision that perhaps not even an adult would be able to carry out without hesitation. The ruling was described as historic by the family’s lawyers. Maybe. But history, as we know, always judges later. And often he will not make any concessions on a justice that, despite the respect due to every sentence, seemed immature to us.
